Fifty years ago Thornton Wilder admitted that he disliked the
theater. Too theatrical, he said; too stale to express how people
actually think and feel. Since Wilder's time there have been plenty
of experiments in eliminating the kind of staginess he thought
interfered with reality and undermined belief.

The Tectonic Theater Project's production The Laramie Project,
currently playing at the Union Square, is, admirably, one of these. From
its initial set--a stark space with five crude oak tables resembling a
rural polling place on voting day--to the plainsong delivery of its
players, the air of the piece is immediate and democratic. The audience
is let in on everything--from the company's decision to make six
trips to Wyoming to conduct hundreds of interviews to their individual
fears about the project. It's almost as if dissolving the old
theatrical hierarchies is the first step in bringing home to us the 1998
beating and death of young, gay Matthew Shepard on the outskirts of
Laramie, Wyoming, by two local heterosexuals about his age.

The Tectonic Theater members know something about the power of
fact. Their Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, built
entirely from historical documents, was the surprise Off Broadway hit of
1998, delivering a more vivid picture of Wilde and his times than any of
the numerous stage or film versions you are likely to see. The actors
inhabited the speech and gestures of Victorian Englishmen just as they
do the citizens of Laramie. But in The Laramie Project they go further,
reminding us frequently of who they are in the company as opposed to
whose words they are speaking--whether those of the emergency-room
doctor who treated Shepard, for instance, or the bicyclist who found him
tied to a fence, or his friends and those of the killers, or university
people, law enforcement officials, religious leaders and sundry others.
Candor rules, facts liberate and we should have no illusions, theatrical
or otherwise.

This is, of course, the stage landscape that Anna Deavere Smith
staked out in Fires in the Mirror, her 1991 piece about the Crown
Heights riots, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, the series of interviews
she conducted around the Rodney King incident and its aftermath. Though
both start from a morally neutral point of view, the Tectonic's
ensemble effort in Laramie and Smith's solo re-enactments of her
interviews play out quite differently.

Near the beginning of Laramie a professor at the University of
Wyoming describes the aftermath of Shepard's beating, ending with
the moment "the media arrived and there was no opportunity to
reflect on anything anymore." Reflection is one thing, but
spontaneous speech is quite another, and despite some intense moments in
The Laramie Project, you do get the sense that many of these citizens
were talked out well before they were interviewed by the Tectonic
players. Some, like the bartender who served both Shepard and his
killers on the fateful night, deliver a media-worn routine. Others
respond with sentiments and wisdom received from the media.

Strangest of all, their language is almost polished. Unlike most of
us, they usually finish their thoughts; their sense of themselves and
their self-presentation is firm; and they speak without what Smith calls
the "sludge" of language--the linguistic noodling that
inadvertently reveals character in hesitations, redundancies, pauses,
non sequiturs, evasions and nonsense. Perhaps the individual interviews
didn't go on long enough to break through the sincere but
unwittingly well-rehearsed to a moment of revelation, but I doubt it. If
Wilder was right about the stage interfering with reality, what would he
say about the frame the media has put around our speech and our lives?
The television screens suspended on the back wall in the second act of
The Laramie Project seem to acknowledge this problem but maybe not the
toll it has taken on what we can and cannot learn here.

The communities of Crown Heights and Los Angeles were also talked
to death in the aftermath of their cataclysms, and yet Smith's
theater pieces dug out new material from the sludge of speech,
wince-making riffs and inspiring ones as well, fresh revelations even
from the stalest language. How she does this I can't say. The
eminent linguist William Labov once observed that the talk of almost all
middle-class people is virtually interchangeable, and yet Smith finds
distinctiveness and a hidden charge of meaning within the most mundane
delivery, whereas the citizens in The Laramie Project mostly bear out
Labov's observation. At the end of Fires and Twilight you can say,
I have been shown something I didn't know, and yet it is something
I recognize as true. The word "catharsis" comes to mind.

Laramie is a town with a terrible crime, but no terrible truths
come to light here. This beautifully staged canvassing of its citizens
is well paced and absorbing but not ultimately affecting. The focus of
the piece, the gay hate crime, as the media insisted on describing it,
is a problematic center maybe because it rests on the processed wisdom
of too many people at the mercy of too many articles, newscasts and
interviews. Laramie does not seem any more homophobic than many other
places--perhaps that's why it's hard for The Laramie Project
to go deep enough to reveal something we didn't know we knew.
Shepard was a victim because he was gay, but the beating was, as JoAnn
Wypijewski wrote in Harper's, more an opportunistic crime by two
louts at the end of a methamphetamine binge than an act of homophobic
rage.

The members of the Tectonic Theater Project radiate honesty; they
found what they found. But I wandered from the performance occasionally
to consider, unfairly perhaps, what they didn't find, and afterward
I wondered whether the secret shame of Laramie might be that in this
upright community there's an element of routine and absent-minded
moral indifference. After all, a substantial number of people, like the
killers, seem to have been written off by the rest of Laramie as social
discards, or "lazy little crankheads," as one local described
them to Vanity Fair. Drugs and the dead-end lives of the killers are two
motifs, little examined in the press, that also do not figure into The
Laramie Project--untold stories lurking beneath one too often told.

In Short: Jo, in Claudia Shear's Dirty Blonde (Helen Hayes
Theatre), has a thing about Mae West, and I have a thing about Claudia
Shear. The fact is, I know she's way more interesting than Mae
West, who was only one of those small, controlling blondes fixated on
sex but not very sexy, like Madonna or Andy Warhol. Claudia is not small
and her wonderful solo show, Blown Sideways Through Life, an extended
description of a big girl's sixty-four-job search for decent work,
reminded me of the biography of Gutzon Borglum, who carved Mount
Rushmore. If he hadn't found such an extravagant outlet for his
pathology and his ambitions, only the local lockup would have heard of
him. I imagine something of the sort might have awaited Shear without
her improvisations on the stage. Anyway, Dirty Blonde, a three-person
play set in the present, with re-enactments from West's life, is a
great vehicle, and Shear and her excellent co-stars, Bob Stillman and
Kevin Chamberlin, drive it with maximum risk. From its strike-me-pink
lipstick set to the finale with the greatest kiss on Broadway, Dirty
Blonde goes deep into the heart of the stigmatized and comes out with a
perfect piece of Erving Goffmanesque wisdom: We like these stories of
the marginal; we know them well. And how is that? We are all
stigmatized.

From what I am told, Our Lady of Sligo is not Sebastian
Barry's very best play; The Steward of Christendom apparently holds
that honor. You should go anyway to the Irish Repertory Theater to see
the superb Sinead Cusack in the title role. "Utterly without
ego," my theater mate remarked of Cusack's performance.
Remarkable and true.

Elizabeth Pochoda, executive editor of House & Garden, is a
former Nation literary editor.

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